Welcome to the Greenhouse Read Free Page A

neighbors had a great time complaining how the crops and grazing were hard hit by out-of-season storms and dry spells, which they blamed on pollution caused by the same city people who needed our farms, but no one can say Jack Shofield isn’t honest. I accept my share of it. It doesn’t matter that all of southern Oklahoma has fewer people in it than downtown Hollywood or that I typically saw no more than five or six other trucks on my way to the feed shop. Poison is poison. Like everyone, I just wanted to get about my business ASAP.
    I’m no preacher and I think we’ve all heard all we need about sin, destruction, and salvation. I just want to set the record straight.
    He was my son.
    People called him everything from Savior to Satan in every language known to man. We named him Albert Timothy after his grandfathers. Margie and me are old-fashioned enough to believe in things like honor and respect, and we would have taught him so if we’d had the chance. But we only met him twice.
    It’s true in a literal sense that the world revolved around him. I think the real miracle lies in the fact that
people
revolved around him. From the news at the time, you wouldn’t have thought there were twelve decent folk left anywhere, and yet he grew to be strong, caring, and smart despite having every last one of six billion selfish apes as parents.
    Margie’s a tough girl. That’s why I married her. She didn’t scream until our baby was all the way out of her. The doctor yelled, too. I thought the boy must have three arms or something, so I shoved a nurse to get a look at him. He was already tumbling toward the door like a little pink log. Then the first quakes knocked the building down. I was thrown to the floor, and I never did catch up.
    How did our infant son survive? Utter strangers fed and changed him as he passed. Folks kept him warm with the clothes off their backs. They emptied their wallets to get bottles and formula when store owners didn’t put those things in their hands for free. After a few days, entire nations prepared for him even when his projected course was nowhere near, because the projections weren’t worth much. He usually rolled east to west, opposite of Earth’s natural rotation as if pushing the planet beneath him, but for the first few years he wobbled north and south seemingly at random—and when he learned to walk, he jaunted from pole to pole as he chose.
    There’s been a lot of talk from scientists, holy men, and politicians. Believe what you want. The truth is nobody can explain him and nobody ever will. The proportion’s all wrong. It’s flat-out scary, in fact, like a flea spinning a ball the size and weight of Australia.
    Clocks and calendars quickly became useless. One day would pass in twenty hours, the next in twenty-eight or seventeen. Seasons changed in a matter of weeks.
    There was just no way to ignore him.
    Wars stopped as he went by. Starving tribes in West Africa mashed their last handfuls of grain into mush for him.
    Why didn’t he bruise to death? Microgravitational skins, they said. Angels, they said. Before he was old enough to control it, some instinct or higher power wove him around buildings and cliffs and trees. Later in life, he walked the globe like a man on a spherical treadmill. When he was just four months old he got stuck in a box canyon in Peru and the whole world shuddered for three hours until a brave rancher went in on hands and knees and shoved him in the right direction.
    You’d think he would’ve had trouble keeping food down, rolling, always rolling, but eventually some big brain proved he was actually orbiting the sun as smooth as silk while it was the planet itself that did the shifting up and back and sideways beneath him.
    And the oceans? Rivers and lakes? He walked on water. As a baby he returned to shore hungry and stinking, wailing because no one had fed or changed him. Later, as a child, he went hog-wild playing with dolphins and seals—and in the